Well it's more then possible that a virus has disabled your AV ... I would scan your system again w/ something like housecall and see if it finds anything else. If your system is then clean you might have to reinstall your AV depending on how the virus went about disabling it.

Yeah, certain viruses attempt to disable or cripple antivirus software in certain ways. My roommate got a virus yesterday, and it brought Norton down to its knees. Besides that, it added every major antivirus manufacturer's URL to the hosts file and mapped them all to 127.0.0.1, so he couldn't even head over to Symantec's site to find a solution until I told him what the problem was.
Freaky...

Well it's more then possible that a virus has disabled your AV ... I would scan your system again w/ something like housecall and see if it finds anything else. If your system is then clean you might have to reinstall your AV depending on how the virus went about disabling it.

would resolve google.com to that IP address. Some new spyware hijacks this file and points normal address [i.e. symantec.com] to a spyware site.

now if you put in there

216.239.57.99 yahoo.com

Typing yahoo.com would actually take you to google.

this is what the default hosts file looks like

Code:

# Copyright (c) 1993-1999 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host
127.0.0.1 localhost

# Copyright (c) 1993-1999 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host